Go West

Another iteration of "Theorizing Religion" is finished, producing some splendid final reflection essays and a slightly lower energy sharing of insights with each other. The latter was to be expected, as finals for other classes kick in, but the former was a bit of a surprise. They got it! What a privilege to teach a subject that people engage with such openness, curiosity and tenderness. Because many were quite personal I can't share them, but I can share some fun things that happened as gleanings from them were shared with the class. 

After giving the students the chance to share their final papers with two classmates, I invited everyone to come up to the board and talk - and to use the colored markers if they wanted. The first were the two open hands, above, from a student who reported their most religious experience was making things, when they felt at one most human and least human at the same time. Next came the rainbow, which, the drawer explained, could legitimately be appreciated as a sign from God by one person and a natural phenomenon by another. The heart with "magic" written at its center accompanied a story of a natural wonder which proved enduringly transcendent, even as the drawer had hoped it would recur and didn't. A shoe illustrated another students' religious devotion to clothing and fashion. A grave pointed to animals' funerary practices, which they of course don't call religious or need to. Others drew a cross (after saying "I don't think I have anything to draw") and described their growing disaffection with the influence Christian ideas of salvation have on people, a circle representing ineffabaility, a dark rectangle connoting the void at the heart of apophatic tradition. And another student cheerfully connected all the others with drawings of rhizomes!

But let me tell you especially about the outline of the continental US with a question mark at its center, which led to some remarkable and complicated insights. The student had written in their final reflection paper that our class had taken them from wondering “what does religion mean to me?” to the “more interesting” questions “what does it mean to be religious in America?”, or even “what does being American mean to me?” After drawing their map on the board they reported to the class that, for the final in a print-making class yesterday, they’d made a series of monoprints of the American west, a place they’d never been, based just on the images they’d gleaned from popular culture—things like the film “Paris, Texas” and the TV series “Breaking Bad.” They’ve never been farther than Missouri or Indiana, although someday they’ll surely go, but they wanted to preserve “the mysticism of this unknowing state,” something they’ll never be able to do again once they've actually been. In their reflection for our class, they had wondered about what the American land they haven't seen looks like (hence the question mark), something they imaged as full of awe. But there’s an awe at the thought of all this awe they haven’t seen, too, they added with coy eloquence, “which is a religious experience in itself.” 

They had the prints with them and I asked if they would show them to us. The prints were gorgeous, semi-abstract blocks of variegated blues, golds, reds, greens and browns suggesting horizons, skies, clouds, mountains. As they were held up, the artist named them: Arizona, Montana, Utah, Colorado… through California. We were transfixed. You managed to capture a very specific place in California, a Californian told them, the Tejon Pass! But it turns out that they had added the state names after the whole series was complete. They were all just evocations of "the west." This did not stop another Californian from asking if they were selling the prints, as she has a “California wall” in her apartment for when she gets homesick, and would love the one called "California" for it.

I'm not sure what this tells you about religion - or California! (Coming east from California myself I realized I had been living unwitting in uneasy eastern fantasies.) But it says something about the spiritual scrupulosity of a generation burned by public "religion" yet unsatisfied with the flatness of secularism. I can't generalize about, or from, the students who wound up in the class this semester, but many seem taken by the thought that "religion" might be alive and well not in the "religions" but in places superficially thought of as secular.

Ethically sourced

"Theorizing Religion" did the AMNH "Asian Peoples" galleries one better today. After we shared our generally very critical appraisals of the layout, contents and language of the gallery - indeed its very appearance in a museum of natural history! - I said: Suppose they said "We hear you. This exhibition is an embarrassment. We're taking it down. Give us some ideas for what we could do with that space to offer a better understanding of religion." 

Folding in what we had deemed most powerful about the less problematic Northwest Coast Hall as well as themes from our class discussions on what's excluded in definitions of "world religions" and even "religion," one group kept the architecture of the existing gallery but transformed it in a most marvelous way!

Natural history of religion

Invited my Theorizing Religion students to join me at the American Museum of Natural History to marvel at just how much religion is on show in their galleries of non-western cultures. In a natural history museum?! 

The absence of galleries on, um, white people is damning. (In fact it would be hard to find a better illustration of the things we've been reading about in Tomoko Masuzawa and Sylvia Wynter, the racialization of non-western cultures as "natural" phenomena whose pith is religion.) But Christianity sneaks in, in the little vitrine in the "Asian Peoples" gallery devoted to Georgians, a minority tradition barely worthy of description.

The Religion Of ...

I'm trying something new in "Theorizing Religion," to address the reality that most students have no background in the study of religion. For the past several years I had student teams audit Harvard Divinity School "World Religions through their Scriptures" MOOCs (Buddhism or Islam)m a kind of crash course they had to report to the class on over four weeks near the start of the semester. But those MOOCs aren't available anymore, at least not for auditing, so I had to think of something else. 

What we're trying this year, instead, also involves student teams giving a sequence of presentations to the class over multiple weeks based on out-of-class research. For the first week, they're to "look wherever you usually look when you want to find out about something" (online of course). For the next, they need to go to the NYU Library and explore the stacks to get a sense of what kind of academic work there is on their topic. For the third we'll either seek out native informants or endeavor comparisons - TBD. The rather naughty list of topics, designed to force reflection on theorizing religion? "The religion of Confucianism / Buddhism / Fashion / ISKCON / Neopaganism / Secularism." These images are from the first presentations.

Religious umami

This year's "Theorizing Religion" draws students from all over the university. I appreciated the wealth of passion and experience this brings when I asked them today, during a round of introductions today (we haven't seen each other in two weeks, because of the Labor Day holiday), to tell the class about another class they were enjoying this semester. I know our students (and curriculum) are wild but still wasn't prepared for this feast:

Multi-Disciplinary Calculus •• The Blues Aesthetic •• Marketing and Branding •• Dubied Machine Knitting •• Catholic Saints and their Cults •• Immersive Storytelling (Virtual Reality) •• American Dream Soundtrack •• Umami Studies •• Social Media Empires •• Advanced Screen Printing •• Philosophy and Tragedy •• The Politics of Wounds •• Fine Arts Thesis Workshop •• Woodworking •• Qualities of Water

I don't even know what many of these are! We learned that the "umami studies" class includes a mushroom foraging trip and a student kindly showed me the work she'd done with the Dubied knitting machine after class... But what a fun context for exploring implicit and explicit understandings of religion. 

(The images above are drafts for covers of a book on religion we came up with.)

Fall blooms

 

Both of my classes are off to a good start, I think. Back in the saddle!

Orientalism lives!

Checked out the new west entrance to the American Museum of Natural History, a curvy wasp's nest-inspired concrete concoction which turns out to be airy enough but a little more exciting in photos than in real life. But creating an entrance at what had been the back of the museum not only adds new space but changes flows, and we found ourselves in a gallery it was hard to believe was anywhere in a museum in 2024. 

Called "Asian Peoples," if you came at it from the east, as people before presumably did, you arrived from "Asian Mammals" (!). From half-naked "primitives" you'd work toward the "higher civilizations" of China, India and the Islam world. But we, like throngs of others now, came at it from the end, invited in by what was once the exhibit's sending-off, a sort of diorama of Samarkand captioned "The Lure of Asia." Seriously?!

By weird coincidence, the eminent Indian American historian of British colonialism Priya Satia published a critique of this gallery today (!). She was in the museum with her children earlier this month and so appalled at what she saw that she wrote a thread on X, response to which was vigorous enough that ThePrint asked her to write the article.

 

The displays of human cultures have been part of AMNH from the start - and, of course, they cover every part of the world except Europe. But I was dumbstruck to learn that this Orientalist fantasy, which I assumed dated to the bad old days when it hosted the Second International Eugenics Congress just over a century ago, in fact dates only to 1980! That was just two years, Satia points out, after Edward Said published Orientalism, calling out western "orientalists" for their presumed capacity - indeed superior capacity - to understand the east. 

 

Satia wonders about what walking through these galleries has meant to generations of school children. ("Are we Southeast Asian?" I heard one teenager ask a parent.) Satia's particular focus was the representation of India as monolithic, monolithically Hindu and caste-obsessed. In her brief essay she doesn't remark on the bizarrely mandala-like representation of "The Indian Worldview" which somehow nests within each each other "Myth and Epic," "The Pattern of History," "The Pattern of Everyday Life," "The Four Ends of Man" and "Caste and Karma" (at the center!), all framed by "The Powers of the Gods" and "The Vedic Cosmos." Monolith, anyone?

We learn also how Arabic culture is founded on admiration for Greece and Rome, and why Chinese science never became truly scientific like the west's. I'd like to know what this exhibition replaced, and who was involved in putting it together: I'm sure they thought they were doing better. Satia's X-discussions suggest there have been many protests over these and other galleries in the "Human Origins and Cultural Halls" - producing little more than some unconvincing signage indicating that the exhibits may be a little dated and need rethinking.

 

But, appalling though it is, it occurred to me it might make a good field trip destination for "Theorizing Religion" this fall. (Perhaps the week we read Hume's Natural History of Religion...?!) Students will be invited to study this gallery, compare it with the completely different vibe of the Northwest Coast galleries, recently completely redone in consultation with indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. These galleries are chock full of "religion" and theories of its evolution, all somehow "natural history" - and imbibed by countless schoolchildren. (If I do this I'll need to return and have a look at the galleries of African, South and Central American and Pacific Peoples. The other galleries of indigenous North American cultures are closed.)

 

Collagin'

Today proved a day of collaging. In "Religion of Trees" it was the "zine workshop" planned by my student assistant, and each of us crafted a page for the final work. (Details soon!) Then in "Theorizing Religion," a group presentation on Universe of Terms had the class collage as a way of replicating the way that book was put together. Not a bad way to get exhausted people engaged at the end of the semester...

History of ideas

In "Theorizing Religion" today we dove into Friedrich Schleiermacher's "On the Essence of Religion." I had students pair up to go through two pages line by line and they discovered that they didn't really understand what he was talking about, or even what he meant by things like "metaphysics," "morals" or even "religion" - things they hadn't noticed in skimming the text for class. An hour and a bit later they did - and had also learned the value of understanding a text in its historical context. 

And while they still hemmed and hawed at pronouncing his name - we decided to just mumble "Schlrrrrrr" - they liked what he was saying. Seeing how his invention (he calls it a discovery) of an "essence" of religion distinct from but the necessary complement to thinking and acting solved an intellectual puzzle made it all make sense. Next week we'll ask if that's the right puzzle to be solving!

Foiled

Tried something new in "Theorizing Religion" today. We're starting a 4-session tour through some classic texts in the study of religion, but since the class meets weekly for 3 hours there's time to pair each one with something contemporary. For Hume's Natural History of Religion I decided it might be interesting to read some work by Sylvia Winter, and chose the essay "The Pope must have been drink the King of Castile a madman: Culture as actuality, and the Caribbean rethinking modernity," in part because it's among her most accessible.

On its own this essay (from 1995) would already be a valuable corrective to the contemporary US-focused religious studies reflex to blame everything on "Protestant" conceptions of religion. Caribbean-oriented Wynter argues that our problems go deep into medieval Catholic understandings of the "non-homogeneity" of the supernaturally saved celibate church and the sinful secular world, a "non-homogenity" reproduced first in Renaissance humanism's celebration of European Man in contrast to the brown and black "humans" colonized and enslaved in the age of empire, and then into 19th century "race science" and the invention of whiteness. As a frame and foil for Hume it worked brilliantly, too! Hume comes a few centuries after the Renaissance but, especially in NHR, writes like a humanist, apparently bypassing Christianity to root his arguments in the wisdom of Greco-Roman antiquity. And, while it's hidden by the all-purpose misanthropy of NHR, Hume in other works is just on the cusp of the invention of race. 

Wynter's title refers to the response of Cenú Indians to the papal bull "granting" the "new world" to the King of Spain, given definitive form in the 1513 "Requerimiento." Their land wasn't the pope's to give, or the king's to accept! But, as Wynter stressed, the purpose of the Requerimiento wasn't really to persuade. If the inhabitants of these territories claimed by the King of Castile, by divine right vouchsafed by the Pope, didn't accept the new state of affairs, they announced themselves to be inimicos Christi, whom the Spanish crown was entitled to dispose of as they saw fit, killing or enslaving them. 

It's madness but it kills, and the descendants of the vilified and enslaved continue to bear the scars of the raving presumption of "non-homogeneous" superiority of Catholic Church, modern state, Man of reason, human sciences, progress over all others. Descendants of all these remain blinded by an inability to understand ours as just one of many cultures - as in our need for religion (as we understand it) to be part of human nature and for all religions to be incipiently "world religions." But while NHR is the founding document of the social-scientific study of religion, the fall guy in today's discussion turned out to be discipline associated today with Hume, "philosophy," his alternative Hume (though in more humble ways than most) to the mess of human ignorance, superstition and intolerance. Why are "philosophy" and "ancient philosophy" and "modern philosophy" in our curricula never marked as western? Jewish or Indian or African philosophy are hyphenated terms, but the project of philosophy "itself" is, in Wynter's sense, a dream of "aculturality." Drunk or mad?

And for those who don't get it or don't accept it (I'm thinking of my colleague R's talk in "After Religion" last week), isn't a text like Natural History of Religion a kind of Requerimiento?

An easy fast

The New School no longer observes the Jewish holidays, but several students didn't come to class today because of Yom Kippur. Others were out because of the return of covid-19. Seemed best to save the most important topics for another class when all could be present - and to think about ways of sharing what we were doing with those missing class. In "Religion of Trees" our end of class drawing session was given greater resonance for knowing that these other students would see our work (the prompt: "a tree someone worships").

In "Theorizing Religion" we decided to postpone a large group activity and spent the whole class diving deep into the assigned readings - saving time at the end for students to write up what we discussed for the benefit of absent classmates. Time flew as we thought through the results of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project and a literature review calling for more integrated research on gender, sexuality and religion from the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. The latter seemed to offer ways beyond the limitations and implicit agendas of the former, exemplified by the graph above mapping reponses to the rather particular question whether it's "necessary to believe in God to order to be moral and have good values" - which we firmly doubt could be meaningfully translated across religions and languages - with GDP per capita. What the?

Duty calls

"Theorizing Religion" started yesterday, too, and with a surprise. When we went around the room with introductions, more than half of the 17 present indicated they were Religious Studies minors. (This course is the only requirement for the minor, leading several to quip that they were here because they wanted to be, but also because they had to be.) Terrific news - this is more minors than we've had in a while! But it's also a little confusing. To declare the minor one is supposed to meet with the director, which is me ... but most of these faces were new to me. No worries - we'll be talking now!

We talked a lot about the set of images that have kicked this course off since zoom days, revealing the familiar combination of overflowing curiosity and gaps in religious literacy which animates the course. We have work to do, and even the unexpected minors are up for it!

Back to school

Just in time for the new semester (we begin Monday), my syllabi!

None of the classes is new, having been last taught in Fall 2021, Fall 2022 and Spring 2023, respectively, but all have been more or less significantly updated. Theorizing is incorporating Universe of Terms (auditioned in After Religion last semester), bringing back a section on classic texts (Hume and Schleiermacher, welcome back!) and exploring the inaugural issue of the new journal Queer Trans Religion. After Religion brings in the religion of Earthseed, Islamic feminist environmentalism, Amazonian animism, and the story of the COEXIST bumper sticker. And Religion of Trees, which didn't have a chance to run its full course last time, is kitted out with more botany, two field trips, and "wild card" sessions exploring the gendering and racialization of trees - and how the history of religion has been (mis)represented by tree diagrams; under the guidance of an undergraduate academic fellow we're making a zine, too! 

I"ll keep you posted, not least to help myself keep them distinct.

Theory in practice

Because of the vagaries of holidays, courses in this endless-seeming semester have been wrapping up for over a week. My Wednesday class finished last week. My Tuesday-Thursday class finished Tuesday of this week. And "Theorizing Religion," which meets Fridays, ended today. I thought students might be ready to let it go and at last week's meeting offered to move the final class on zoom (or even cancel it), but they wanted to gather one more time - and for it to be in person. And so we were, on an otherwise empty campus. In fact, because of unseasonal weather, we spent our final hour sitting outdoors! Not everyone came but there were eight stalwarts (the mandala impresario was on my laptop) and it felt positively countercultural. 

We started with two final presentations of student research - on the dodgy "Tiger Temple" Wat Pha Luang Ta Bua Yanasampanno in Thailand, and on the flirty fishing Christian "sex cult" the Children of God. Typically tabloidy topics but I've long since learned how to spin discussion in edifying directions. Things turned really festive once we moved outside to share final reflections. Almost all who made it today are from art, design or theater, and we ended up talking about how the community of artists is like the ideal of religious pluralism - respecting and even celebrating each other's difference in a spirit of collaboration rather than competition - except that they don't know how to talk or think about religion. Some do now! Indeed it emerged that these students have been forwarding and discussing texts from our class to friends and family all semester. Not bad for a Friday class!

Upaya?

One of the pleasures of teaching at The New School is students from Parsons School of Design who think in creatively different ways. This is the fruit of the final presentation by a student who had undertaken to explore why Jewish people are drawn to Buddhism and was supposed to share some of her findings and process. Instead, or as the presentation, she had her classmates gather around a table and told us we were going to create a mandala for our class. She gave each of us a piece of clay which we were to shape any way we wanted and then add to the "mandala" growing on a piece of crinkled foil. Before next week's (final) class she will fire it in a kiln, and bring it back with paints for us to add color. Everyone was enraptured but I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Perhaps as we apply colors next week she'll share thoughts from the paper version of the project:

Buddhism through its life has expanded far beyond the location of its conception underneath the Bodhi tree. While directionally, Buddhism moved through China toward Japan through the interconnectivity of the Silk Roads, as modernization grew and [given] the diasporic fate of the Jewish people, Buddhism’s journey toward the West has found refuge in the minds of many contemporary American Jews. An aspect of the unique quality of Buddhism is its capacity to preserve preexisting faith and cultures by enriching the practitioner’s devotion rather than using means of destruction or conversion.

While it's unorthodox to think of Buddhism as "finding refuge" rather than offering it, it makes a kind of sense of our clay concoction. Perhaps my student is a JewBu bodhisattva?

[Update 12/17: Our bodhisattva wasn't able to come to class, as someone she had come in contact with had tested positive for covid, so our mandalizing was interrupted. Or maybe a deeper Dharma saw a chance to remind us that in samsara everything is transitory!]

Religion sauna

In this new iteration of "Theorizing Religion," the birth of the modern notion of religion in Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion to the Cultured among its Despisers comes two thirds of the way in. I'm not sure what I was thinking as I planned it, but in practice it looked to make sense coming after a section on the challenges of contemporary American Christianity and the question if there's a non-theological way to say some (many!) so-called Christians aren't Christians, their religion not even religion. Something like that pathos animates Schleiermacher in 1799. But the students took it in a different direction, finding a sort of blessing for the spiritual but not religious. I let them run with it, playing out the Romantic possibilities, but at the end of class I told them this was the first half a pair of classes like a sauna. The cold bath of Feuerbach and Marx await. Institution-free individual experience? Irreligion! Worse: commodity capitalism.

Many Christs

Surprised the students in Theorizing Religion today by suggesting to them that Christianity might be more than they think it is... or maybe even more than anyone thinks it is. We were building on James Cone's argument, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, that most white Americans' Christianity isn't really Christianity since it overlooks the continued centrality of the crucifixion - the paradoxical cruciform idea that the last are first and the way to hope is through suffering. Authentic Christianity - and God - is there whenever an innocent person is crucified, something which tragically happens all the time, though more often to people of color. Supposed Christians who ignore the ongoing reality of crufixion, especially in racist killings, are Christians in name only, Cone preaches.

I have the class read Cone for the significance of his ideas as well as to introduce them to the different kinds of claims made by theologians. Scholars of religion can't make the sorts of claims about true and false religion that religious folks are making all the time - or at least not in the same way. As a scholar I have to recognize that the people Cone criticizes would consider his Christianity inauthentic, even if, as a Christian, I want to take his side. I have, at least initially, to accept as Christian all who so describe themselves.

I wanted the students to appreciate that Christian theology has many mansions. What else, I asked, besides the crucifixion, might someone think is the central deciding event/symbol in Christianity? I went through a few important possibilities.

- Jesus' resurrection: the defeat of death and the promise of immortality, a refuge from the pain and sorrow of this passing world

- Jesus' incarnation: the paradox of the infinite taking finite form, human or - in more recent thinking - all other forms of created being, giving them a kind of infinite significance

- Jesus' teaching: love of neighbor and enemy, for the least of these, justice and beloved community

- Jesus' healing miracles: supernatural help for the struggle with the trouble of this world, health and abundance in this life

- Jesus' community: the establishment of the church as a way for succeeding generations to be saved and supported

- Jesus' casting out of demons: a protector in spiritual warfare, where we're otherwise outclassed by Satan and his powers and principalities

I noted that all of these had scriptural warrant and, while compatible with each other, really described dramatically different understandings of human life, its meaning and destiny - not to mention the nature of God. I emphasized in particular how commitment to the importance of one of these could go along with rejection of others (and admitted that I was inclined to ignore some, too, especially the last, although this was a widespread view in this country and globally). But, returning to Cone, one needed to see how glossing over the crucifixion on the way to the others could go hand in hand with the moral blindness of injust social orders such as American white supremacy. Not a kumbaya moment!

Engendering religion

Tried something new in "Theorizing Religion" today, giving the students a breathless 2016 Pew study called "The Gender Gap in Religion Around the World." It seemed a good way to introduce quantitative surveys on religion and their problems, as well as to start thinking about how religion is gendered in theory and in practice. To my surprise, most students reported enjoying; it resonated with their experience. Pew's American Protestant metrics of religiosity (affiliation, importance of religion, attendance at weekly worship, daily prayer, belief in heaven/hell) and participation in the

fantasy of monolithic world religions didn't bother them as much as the assumption that everyone is either a man or a woman. And only one noticed that the discovered "gender gap" is in fact pretty small, especially outside the US, and that the writer of the report seems a little disappointed not to have found something bigger. 

There's work to do! Next we tackle "world religions," Eurocentrism and American exceptionalism... and eventually we'll be able to loop back to how gender is formed (differently) by religious traditions, and how different experiences of gender identity/fluidity might express themselves religiously. But I'll be able to be a better guide on the journey knowing that thinking of religiosity and gender in terms of "nature vs. nurture," as the Pew study does, is interesting to them.

Thousands of words

My third class was my longest-standing course, once again in a new form as a weekly "seminar-plus" format. But it was also in an old format - zoom, since continued disruptions of public transit after Ida made an in-person gathering unfeasible. Turns out zoom is an excellent thing to have ready as a fallback! An exercise I devised for the first session of last year's online version and hadn't planned to use again came in handy, and indeed kicked things off brilliantly. Can you believe the sixteen students and I spent an hour and a half discussing just ten pictures, and still had to cut the conversation short?

But I have to say, it worked because it's a damn good selection of images I made, and because of how I arranged them, from the mountaintops of queer kippot and Ulura at top to the Brujeria altar at bottom center, just where one would approach, the smoke from its candles perhaps joining that in the picture of the blessing of images of parishioners in the cathedral of Lima at top center. Demogagic worries are corralled in the lower corners, though the triangular shape of the Kumbh Mela crowd (surely only a tiny subset!) also echoes the altar and points upward, joining sacred rivers and mountains. (It also mirrors the sign in front of the church Donald Trump is desecrating with his upside-down Bible.) The Mayan calendar and a George Floyd canonized as an ancestor (notice the hands holding the figure at a protest, by the way) connect us to the transformative power of time in a horizontal whose uneven rhythm of repeated disks and faces breaks the frame formed by the rows above and below. Pema Chödrön and the cover art from Radical Dharma, incorporating Yijing trigrams as well as a Black Power fist (and the seed of the whole project as part of the ESL Methods course I took last summer), frame the reality and challenge of new populations inhabiting ancient populations. And at the center, Islamic calligraphy (the affirmation of religious plurality of the Quran, as it happens), a challenge to figuration - is it text or image? - which manages not to be an image like the others: unframed, is it not part of the space behind the other pictures? The mystery of pictures is at the heart of the Lima image, too, for the incense doesn't just connect an invisible God to absent people through photographs of them. For these images (which also resonate with our whole gallery of images except for the center) are of people who died of COVID. Whew! What a complex thing religion is, morphing, pulsing, cycling, echoing and foregrounding and backgrounding, linking us to worlds beyond. And best conveyed, yes, by letting pictures do the talking!

Other than religion

For years, when planning and revising the syllabus for "Theorizing Religion," the required course for our religious studies minors, I've felt there was something missing. A major argument of the class is that the modern western category of "religion" distorts the experience of non-western (and non-modern) peoples, and may even have been designed to do that. The world religions paradigm, despite its kumbaya veneer, does that too, registering and (to a degree) venerating as "religion" only those aspects of premodern and non-western traditions which resonate with what Tomoko Masuzawa calls "European universalism." If the modern western "religion" concept was so lousy, oughtn't I to be introducing alternatives from non-western and premodern traditions? The problem (beyond the very real limits of my reading) was baked in: if "religion" is a modern western thing, illegitimately projected onto cultures and traditions foreign to it, then there are no non-western or premodern analogs to turn to. Indeed supposing there are is just repeating the same mistake; assuming there must be counterparts to it reasserts the universality of the category of "religion" we claim we're trying to think beyond!

In "After Religion," I had just one class - our topic for the week is What is "religion" anyway? - to take a stab at these questions, but I made headway somehow! The time limits probably helped, as did the fact that this course isn't an introduction to the academic study of religion. But best of all were the readings I wound up assigning, two chapters from Brent Nongbri's Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept, and an essay on "Indigenous African Traditions as Models for Theorizing Religion" by Edward P. Antonio. (Students were also assigned a fab documentary about The Satanic Temple, but that's topic for another post.) Nongbri's a historian of the religions of the ancient (western) world, and his little book deftly demonstrates the many unfamiliar ways the word religio was used before modernity - there was no analog to the modern concept - and chronicles the emergence in the Renaissance and early modern period of the "modern notion of religion as an essentially private or spiritual realm that somehow transcends the mundane world of language and history (18), touching on Ficino, Bruno, Herbert of Cherbury, Bodin and Locke. But for most of my students, the European 16th and 17th centuries are ancient history.

More exciting and accessible was the careful argument of Antonio. Before discussing it (in my prerecorded lecture, trying to be animated but not overact), I held up Nongbri's book and the book where Antonio's essay appears, Religion, Theory, Critique: Classic and Contemporary Approaches and Metholologies, a literal door-stopper. More to the point, Religion, Theory, Critique's almost seven hundred pages include fifty-fifty six fine-print chapters on theory of religion of which only four are about "Religion beyond the West," one of which is Antonio's. (The others are, predictably, on the Arabic din, on the Chinese zongjiao, and on  translation.) The myopia of my "Theorizing Religion" is, alas, par for the course. But Antonio's piece as a revelation.

Antonio is rightly leery of the question what African traditions can contribute to the western theory of religion. African traditions are immensely varied and the western theory of religion has routinely ignored all of them. And besides: there is no analog to the modern notion of religion. Any contribution would have to begin by insisting on the "otherness" of indigenous African ways to western theory. Most of what is theorized under “religion” can be theorized in nonreligious terms in African traditions (150).

The point cannot be to ground a new universal theory of religion in indigenous African traditions. The idea that there is such a thing as religion and that it is universal, the idea that underwrites the efforts of many scholars of religion to see religion everywhere, is largely a Western obsession. (149) Instead of a "theory" or "model" he suggests African indigenous traditions might illuminate as a "heuristic," a rough guide that aids the discovery of intelligibility and understanding in knowledge and interpretation (148). Writing in English (except for one reference to ubuntu), Antonio deflects from "religion" with the language of the everyday, common-sense, immanence, phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, anthropology and, most important, a "humanism" focused on persons, communities, hospitality and health and maintained by the indispensable work of divination whose ethically superior practitioners provide[e] a space for determining the preconditions of proper relationally and thus of what it means to be human (152). 

When not explicitly or tacitly denying Africa has religion, or relegating its traditions to some "primal" category, western scholars note the embeddedness of "religion" in everyday social life and argue the significance of the "practice of everyday life" is entirely attributable to religion. Everything is sacred! Antonio suggests that this gets things back to front. Religious practices do not refer to phenomena outside the world (150). The immanent world of everyday social interactions is where everything happens, including not only the relationships that constitute us, but the equally significant practices of hospitality with "others," from ancestors to spirits. If the theory of religion were open to this "heuristic," Antonio brings it together, African religious traditions will have taught the study of religion the importance of privileging not gods, spirits, the cosmos, notions of salvation understood as the quest for the other world, and ritual as bizarre performance of inarticulable abjection, but humanity as the space of relational encounter with otherness in the fullness of all its variety—human, natural, and spiritual (153).

I love this, and have to stop myself from wanting to - yes - universalize it. Isn't this really what's going on even in those "religions" where people are convinced they are guided by "phenomena outside the world," think they can and should stand alone before the transcendent without any human aid or witness? It resonates with my long-standing efforts to characterize religion (sic) in terms of "wider moral communities." And yet, of course, Antonio is also saying that this is not a better, broader account of "religion," though it may describe interactions and relationships which theories of "religion" might appreciate. To learn from it I'll need to try to see whether "anthropological humanism" can satisfy my local as well as broader concerns, and if not, why not. And of course not to stop with the generalizations (and English terms) of his necessarily abbreviated article. Not in this class, but in the next "Theorizing Religion"!